I am a psychologist, speaker, and author. My research has focused on identifying the strategies that help us overcome obstacles to success at work and in our personal lives. I'm the author of Focus (Hudson Street Press, Penguin, 2013), Nine Things Successful People Do Differently (Harvard Business Press, 2011) and Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, Dec 2010). I'm also the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, and I blog regularly for HBR, Fast Company, and Huffington Post.

How To Give Employees A Sense of Autonomy (When You Are Really Calling The Shots)

Most managers and leaders have, on a regular basis, the unenviable task of trying to get other people to adopt particular goals. Companies have agendas, and employees need to support those agendas if the company is to succeed. But if you want your employees to live up to their full potential, it’s not enough that they do what you tell them to – that they work hard and meet deadlines because you said they have to, and you are watching. Ideally, you want the members of your team to see that the goals they are pursuing have real value.

In fact, you want them to make the goals their own – and with good reason. Again and again, studies show that the greatest motivation and most personal satisfaction comes from those goals that we choose for ourselves. Self-chosen goals create a special kind of motivation called intrinsic motivation – the desire to do something for its own sake. When people are intrinsically motivated, they enjoy what they are doing more, and find it more interesting. They feel more creative, and process information more deeply. They persist more in the face of difficulty. They perform better. Intrinsic motivation is awesome in its power to get and keep us going.

Autonomy is particularly critical when it comes to creating and maintaining intrinsic motivation. But in the workplace, goals have to be assigned. What’s a manager to do?

It turns out that it isn’t so much actual freedom of choice that matters when it comes to creating intrinsic motivation, but the feeling of choice. Choice provides a sense of self-determination, even when choice is trivial or illusory.

The good news is, while true autonomy in the workplace can be hard to come by, the feeling of choice can be created fairly easily, using these three tips:

Tip 1: First, and most obviously, your employees need to understand why the goal they’ve been assigned has value. Too often, managers tell their employees what they need to do, without taking the time to explain why it’s important, or how it fits into the bigger picture. No one ever really commits to a goal if they don’t see why it’s desirable for them to do it in the first place. Don’t assume the why is as obvious to your team as it is to you.

Tip 2: When the goal itself is predetermined by Management, allowing your employees to decide how they will reach the goal can create the feeling of choice necessary to be intrinsically motivated. Allowing them to tailor their approach to their preferences and abilities will also give them heightened sense of control over the situation they find themselves in, which can only benefit performance. (If you can’t give them total free reign, try giving them a choice between two options for how to proceed. If even that is not possible, skip directly to Tip 3.)

Tip 3: If you have to assign both the goal and the method for reaching it, try creating the feeling of choice by inviting your employee to make decisions about more peripheral aspects of the task. For instance, if your employees have to attend weekly team meetings to improve communication and collaboration (with both the goals and method for reaching it predetermined), you can have team members take turns deciding what the topic of the meeting will be each week, or even what kind of lunch will be ordered in. Studies show that these more peripheral decisions create a feeling of choice, even when the choices aren’t particularly meaningful or relevant to the goal itself.

Take time to reflect on how you might be able create a greater sense of autonomy in your own workplace using these three steps. Choice is incredibly motivating – to bring out the best in your employees, harness its power.

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